Glowlab is pleased to present the writings of Los Angeles independent curator Chris Balaschak, who recently produced the Itineraries exhibition at Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica. The following text accompanied the exhibition, and we are publishing it in three parts. Included below is the final segment; here is part one, and here is part two.

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Itineraries, part three
by Chris Balaschak

Commutes, Itineraries

There is a section of freeway in Los Angeles that is the "superfreeway" Reyner Banham once predicted [i]. The superfreeway is that freeway only accessible from the freeway itself, a site that transcends the actuality of the city's endless grid - so distant from its time and its space. The particular slice of freeway that I speak of was only recently completed in the 1990s (it starred, unfinished, in the movie Speed). Furthermore this superfreeway is accessible only to the congregation of individual bodies, the carpool, that here directly interchanges personal perceptions of greater Los Angeles across its commute space. It is in the diamond lane of the 105 freeway heading East away from the beach and LAX, that the commuter can transition to the 110 North, heading toward downtown Los Angeles on a semicircular overpass above a grand stratification of freeway and city street below, and underneath LAX flight patterns. At its height this transition road, on a clear day, offers an expansive overview of greater Los Angeles - from oceans to mountains to valleys. Still, the perspective of this view does not offer a distinct point from which to encompass the city. Moving, often near 70-80 miles per hour, the view of the city rises with the overpass, and sinks beneath the horizon of guardrails once the short duration of this event passes. I have often been on this superfreeway making a commute that becomes a regular part of my schedule come the summer months, the migration from Los Feliz to the beach at El Porto and back again. In the return trip to Los Feliz I jettison atop this overpass as if coming up for air from the fluid city below. Even from this high vantage point, one cannot perceive the entirety of the city. The commuting body and the city are in constant motion against one another. Greater Los Angeles spreads ever outward past the horizon into a haze of fog and debris filled air. Though one can quickly glimpse downtown from this site, or the Hollywood sign (so small from this vantage point), the movement and the one-way perspective of the overpass undermine any ability to wholly distinguish a singularity of city beyond my linear narrative through it. The times of such commutes are as unpredictable as the space of the city is incomprehensible. To know and describe greater Los Angeles is a process of commuting; that motion across its surface that can be traced for others, as its form is based on the individual narrative motions of many rather than a single objective and determined perspective.

Early in his reconnaissance for the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Sunset Boulevard baffled Reyner Banham. Traveling into the city along the Pacific Coast Highway, Banham passed a sign for Sunset Boulevard and asked himself "could there be two parts of Greater Los Angeles with Sunset Boulevards, or did the same boulevard run through the various parts of town and, if so, which part did I need?" The confused Banham then realized greater Los Angeles as "totally incomprehensible," one would suspect due to his, previously mentioned, familiarity with the European model of a city. It was as if Banham was stuck in the fluid web, he had nothing to grasp onto and no definite points with which to align himself. Instead Banham was left with lines that could be traversed without a central point of focus. Despite this confusion, Banham was impressed by the linearity of the city and the possibility of its new order of urban form. The distances of movements and lines traversing the city, a space of multiple nodes as intersections that distinctly lacked a central focal point was summed up in this statement: "Los Angeles makes nonsense of itself when it tries to see itself in terms of concepts borrowed from other cities, such as 'downtown.' The unique value of Los Angeles - what excites, intrigues, and sometimes repels me - is that it offers a radical alternative to almost every urban concept" [ii]. Banham would later go on to cite Wilshire Boulevard as "the first linear downtown" [iii]. Such a downtown - and today Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile is far from a focus of cultural or economic interchange - is only perceivable through the linear movement through it - far from the focal, discrete intersections of Benjamin's Paris or Banham's London.

In Los Angeles seemingly all intersections are not only similar but equivalent, central monuments are here replaced with linearity. Greater Los Angeles' better known tourist attraction, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is in itself a monument to the movements of individual experience. Like Banham's citing of Wilshire, Ruscha cites Sunset in recognition of the linear nature of the city and its actuality as a place of linear movement rather than the centricity of a single point. Los Angeles uniquely lacks such focus, though it has long welcomed civic plans, turned comedies of error, to transpose a central downtown into the city. In a longstanding history (most recently in a building by Frank Gehry), civic officials plan to site downtown upon Bunker Hill - these plans have been unraveling themselves since the 1940s [iv]. However Ruscha's Sunset Strip and Banham's Miracle Mile were and are (in the case of Sunset) more commonly held as downtowns to Los Angeles, places to which a mass of population intersects on a regular basis. Even so the uniqueness of these spaces is that they do not allow for a stable perspective from which one can experience the whole space. Instead Wilshire and Sunset are lines that must be traversed and commuted upon in order to describe the site. One cruises back and forth on the Strip, but does no rest at a single point from which the entirety of Sunset can be realized. This is the actuality of greater Los Angeles as a commute space, present in the many possible "downtowns" it has unveiled, downtowns that are lines rather than points, spaces of movement rather than stability. This ongoing, and odd, revisionism to create some sort of downtown, some center upon Bunker Hill specifically, seems antithetical to greater Los Angeles, a space built on linearity, movement, and freedom (freeway) from the panoptical centricity typical of what Banham has called the "standard city" [v]. Instead greater Los Angeles should revel in the commute-space that it has created, a place of vast and infinite cities created by individual narratives, and the itinerant exchange such complexity recognizes.

While Ed Ruscha calls it "nothing," Richard Sennett refers to the common landscape of a commute-laden city as "neutral." Sennett states, "this general principle we now see realized in cities given over to the claims of traffic and rapid individual movement, cities filled with neutral spaces, cities which have succumbed to the dominant value of circulation" [vi]. The common landscape, at the collective level, is a neutral zone - it resists any label that can attach through complete consensus. This landscape is a space where the opposing poles of beginning and end are converging creating equivalence, a common public space, common only to the individual and alien to the collective. As a commute space greater Los Angeles exists neutrally, an equivalent plane where variant movements can exist and create the city without opposition (such as that created between distinguishing center and periphery). Neither public nor private, the roadways of greater Los Angeles are this fluid and indefinite form without such polarity.

The infinitude of lines in the city possess unlimited recollections of pasts, and possible futures, for movements through the space of the city, though no single line defines the form of the city. Greater Los Angeles, a web of variant individuals intersecting in their linear progression between stable points is mutable and constantly shifting. As greater Los Angeles cannot be defined through its multitude of natural topographies - mountains, desert, beaches, grassland - it is an aggregate of disparate identity to which each commute creates its own city. The common landscape of greater Los Angeles is extant in its multifarious private perceptions; held in common to the city is the uncommon actuality between individual experiences. In exchanging the itineraries of individual movements - such as that in the Spider Survey or Ruscha's book - greater Los Angeles is realized as a commute space built upon a horizontal plane; a space of liberated individual experience without a dominant singular vision of the city.

These commutes, across superfreeways, over Spider Cities and through Sunset Strips and Boulevards, redefine the greater Los Angeles commute, and the city itself as a space defining by such movement. Commuting, in its common usage, is the movement between two points (often home and work), repeated on a regular basis. Though the common parlance today is suggestive of postwar suburban white flight, where people lived distant from the city center and moved inward on a daily basis to their workplace, this is in fact the most recent redefining of the term commute. Commuting in this present incarnation has its roots in rail travel, in the commutation ticket. The commutation ticket would be purchased to account for any number of roundtrip travels on a given route, sold at a discounted price. Of course these still exist with the incarnation of the Metro Card or Bus Pass that is purchased by regular travelers on public transportation. Yet this is only a single root of the word commute. The original, or proper, definition is to denote exchange. Currently associated with the chemical movement between molecular bodies in molecular sciences, this usage of commute as an exchange is an apt fusion of the individualized perspective of the city created through the single linear movement and the web of these lines left as itineraries interchanged between individuals. In light of the Spider Survey and Ruscha's books, a more intriguing definition of commute engages us, that which denotes both a back and forth movement as well as the exchange inherent in tracing this space as itineraries.

Though the Spider Survey and the Sunset Strip both are a method of mapping the city, they each become map through a system of exchange between individuals. Without exchange from one to another, these maps of a city fraught with itineraries does not exist. When individual commutes are recorded and become itineraries, a second commute of exchange opens itself. These itineraries can commute between individuals, a sharing of experiences of the city, of other possible cities within the web of greater Los Angeles. The case of the Survey reveals the exchange at the level of individual contributing to a larger map they will then share in, that of the greater Los Angeles spider population. Ruscha records his experience of the Sunset Strip and unfolds that movement, this back and forth commute space, for others to read. Greater Los Angeles is susceptible to many mappings, moving beyond the arbitrary structure of road maps such as the Thomas Guide that attempt and fail to frame a geography that is in constant mutation. The exchange of the commuting body from one to another through the itineraries they have traced opens up the multitude of cities that are realized, reenacted and anticipated in the web of greater Los Angeles. In exchange certain lines and interchanges become reinforced through their constant usage, and this constant traversal on certain lines creates the tensile strength of the web. Such reinforced itineraries, like those of the superfreeway, Ruscha's Strip, or the Spider Survey's map, do not create complete coherence of the city but rather contribute to the complex whole. These especially tensile lines are more common commutes, yet they accent the role of individual movement in the creation and definition of the city's complex urban geography.

In the indefinite fluidity of greater Los Angeles, where millions of linear commutes crisscross in creating the web of the city, the city does not have form without intersection and exchange. Implicating the fluidity of a world in constant movement, Edouard Glissant has referred to this contemporary state of individualism as internal exile. "Internal exile," Glissant writes, "strikes individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of a community to its surroundings are not, or at least not yet, consented to by this community as a whole" [vii]. The individual body is far from exilic upon its own path, yet in relation to other paths and itineraries the individual body remains distant. To a collective common we each are in exile but within the commute of the individual, and its exchange with others, a more definite root to place is formed. In the share of these narrative lines defining the city, such exile is released as the individual realizes other cities to be experienced upon similar, and perhaps divergent, paths through the city. Between the poles of the collective and the individual, the public and the private, is where the complexity, and not the chaos, of the greater Los Angeles is divulged. Instead of a postmodern chaos that lacks center, greater Los Angeles moves away from such issues into a new order of linearity. Individual lines reveal past movements while becoming future cities to experience. Such interweaving is crucial to the urban web maintaining itself as fluid and amoebic while also composed and textured.

The web of greater Los Angeles is the array of lines left by others, unfamiliar to one's own, inviting new paths and perspective across a common landscape. It is in the intersection of lines that relations become exchanges of disparate individual experiences. These are the sites from which stable community spreads. As there are many lines there are equally as many exchanges and communities expanding throughout the city. Greater Los Angeles is reliant on this foundation where lines become definitive relations to the city. This spider's web hangs between disparate surfaces and has a complex geometry of incalculable measure, maintaining an unpredictable form created by the aggregation of simple lines [viii]. Greater Los Angeles relies on the exchange of individual itinerant movements, these simple lines, to create a web where other possible routes - into pasts and into futures - can be trafficked between commuting bodies. The diverse communities and individuals of greater Los Angeles intersect through these exchanges of potential cities to be experienced. Such commuting leads to the fluidity of the city, its polymorphic form, exemplified in the naturally occurring capricious lines of tidal ebb and flow upon greater Los Angeles' beach or the hidden fault lines that turn the earth to liquid and continually reshape the topography of the area. Greater Los Angeles is this web stretching between the disparate topographies of beach, mountain, desert, and grassland, that, like the spider's web, holds any number of possible traversals between disparate points over a topographical substructure. The strength of this web is apparent in the exchanges, the intersections of its infinite number of lines, that hold together and mutually conceive the itinerant geography of greater Los Angeles.

[i] Banham's future vision describes "the Superfreeway, with access only from the existing freeways" as becoming the next layer of the transportation palimpsest. Banham, Los Angeles, 72.
[ii] Reyner Banham, "Encounter with Sunset Boulevard," The Listener 80, no. 2056 (Thursday 22 August 1968): 236.
[iii] Banham, Los Angeles, 69.
[iv] There are innumerable sources that delve deeply into the reasoning for this lost center of the city and the lineage of Bunker Hill's equation into recreating a center, but this is not the subject of this paper. Mike Davis' City of Quartz and David Brodsly's L.A. Freeway are two excellent materials that can begin the reader on the path of opening up the complex history of Bunker Hill and Los Angeles' lack of downtown. There is also the common myth that the actual pueblo site from which Los Angeles spread, a center perhaps, has long been lost to time, only to be transplanted onto the tourist-oriented site of Olvera Street. Rather than dwell on the debates of center/periphery, which seems a tired postmodern discourse continually beaten to death by the likes of postmodern geography gurus previously mentioned, a new order that recognizes the inherent loss of the issue of centricity, and the welcoming of the linear instead of the radial, is more apt to the questions of Los Angeles' geographical mystery and "confusion" as Banham has called it.
[v] "The cities of the Old World and the eastern United States run very much to a pattern - you don't realize how standardized they are beneath their much vaunted individualities, until you come up against somewhere like Los Angeles." Banham "Encounter with Sunset..." 236.
[vi] Sennett, 256.
[vii] Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) 19.
[viii] There is no definite predictability to a spider's web. A web is created for each spatial parameter. Even the common orb web, a circle with radiating lines, reveals a complex of varying sticky and non-sticky threads, differing distances between threads, and is far from rudimentary or geometrically calculable. A good source, and not too technical, for contemporary debates on web form is Samuel Zschokke, "Form and Function of the Orb-Web," European Arachnology 2000, (2002) pp. 99-106.

Glowlab is pleased to present the writings of Los Angeles independent curator Chris Balaschak, who recently produced the Itineraries exhibition at Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica. The following text accompanied the exhibition, and we are publishing it in three parts. Included here is part two; part one can be found here, and part three will be published on October 1.

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Itineraries, part two
by Chris Balaschak

Individuals, Landscapes

A commute is both the act of movement and the existence between two positions or realities, a space of errant circulation. On the one hand the commute is that between-space of the city, that mobile location between two definitive points; on the other hand it is the changing between those two points - an exchange and the movement that this entails. The difference of definition is subtle and herein it is best to explore their correlation in thinking of the commute as a form of narrative. The commute is the exchange from one to another, as the narrative commutes experience from one individual to another. Like the unfolding of a story in a book, a commute is defined by neither beginning nor end, but all the space between those borders. This between-space is defined by the end papers, by the exchange of one to another; it is both of these end papers while being neither. The narrative is a frictional space circulating between the opposing poles of beginning and end, a space of potential becoming of futures and knowing of pasts. The peripheral borders of the book, the end papers, are, like the landscape, of equivalent consequence to all that is held within. The geographic narrative of the landscape is undifferentiated as all points within its field are analogous; it is only the accumulation of individual lines that creates an overall, and ever-changing, narrative of the city. Arbitrary lines can help to define paths through the landscape, such as those found in the ubiquitous Los Angeles County Thomas Guide, but these are just a handful of lines that fluctuate through the urban web of greater Los Angeles. The formal squaring off of territories, epitomized by the Thomas Guide and other politically defined borders, is a false account of the city. The roads we travel upon in our commutes, major lines in the urban web form, are only the end papers of a book being constantly read, and written, by millions of individuals. Greater Los Angeles [i] is resistant to central stability, moving towards a fluid form of infinite drawn lines for each individual commuting body. Each individual movement leaves an itinerary as narrative of potential cities within greater Los Angeles, a city welcoming the individual envisioning infinite cities; "What is your dream of LA?"[ii]

Prior to the writings of postmodern geographers such as Mike Davis, Frederic Jameson, or Edward Soja, Ed Ruscha closely considered the intersection of the landscape of Los Angeles and the narratives (often literally words) that signified relations to the urban space. Displayed within the books Ruscha produced during the mid-1960s one finds a particularly adept representation of the itinerant geography beneath the facades of the city. Ruscha's books reveal the city as a commute space built upon lines and movement rather than distinct points of centricity or periphery [iii]. Though since the 1960s populations have risen and sprawl has expanded, there is a flux and freedom of movement that endures fundamental to Los Angeles. The dedifferentiated landscape Ruscha documented in his photo-books of the 1960s has only swelled, while the car, the road, and the drive are still definitive to this landscape of greater Los Angeles. These elements of greater Los Angeles lead to the dedifferentiation of the landscape, a site of equivalent points made so through the fluctuating, variant movements of commuting bodies. When Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1950's the city was already a palimpsest of lines by which one could traverse the city. The Thomas Guide has sold its explanation of the greater Los Angeles landscape since the very first edition in 1946. New maps layer upon others, further complicating the complex patterns of the city. Los Angeles has changed its geographical stance little since the 1960s and it is only the globe that has shifted to accommodate the ascension such a global city formed through commutation.

The famous Ed Ruscha book Every Building on the Sunset Strip of 1966 captured a landscape of Los Angeles that conveyed the complex task of defining a landscape without an explicit center. Sunset Strip serves as a map of Ruscha's movement in the city while conceding that this is only one of many potential maps and itineraries underlying the presumed common landscape, the façade, of the city. It is in Ruscha's book that we find the tension between an identity for this façade and the individual relation to it, the paradox of public space defined through private experience. For Ruscha records a commute, his back and forth movement across the Strip, while also producing a book of these images in a volume that a larger public audience could hold in common. Though one would presume to know the space of the Strip as one reads Sunset Strip, here one must remember that it is Ruscha's experience through this space. Ruscha documents the city as detached from any collective consensus of identity, while proclaiming the individual as both defining and signifying a common landscape for the city. In being so the common landscape was deferred, it was not common. Such commonality is only conjecture. For beneath the facades are other narratives to this book, other maps and itineraries foreign to Ruscha's own commute through the city. Intersections, pedestrians, and cars other than Ruscha's beckon us into the mystery of their experience on the Strip. When one reads Sunset Strip (though all images and address numbers, it is a book to be read), we not only are led upon Ruscha's itinerary but cross with others and create our own.

The city Ruscha depicted in Sunset Strip was no longer a common subject but an object in common, a book produced for individual consumption. Ruscha's own desire here was for anonymity on the part of the author [iv]. For Ruscha, any reader was also the author, the photographer, and the driver down the strip. The book in question was produced in an edition with a complete run near 5000 copies (after the second and third editions were printed). Though they are often mythically attributed the quaint and delicate title of 'artist's books' the quantity of these editions leads one to believe these were intended more of a mass-market document [v]. Ruscha employs an inexpensive printing technique for his book, yet instills in them a signature style of typography and photography. The generic appearance veils the uniqueness of Ruscha's design. While being printed en masse the books remain singularly of his hand. Though an artist's multiple, they were meant to be books and they serve as books, open for all to read and interpret, road maps of the proto-history of an amoebic city.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip reads as a narrative and as a linear commute, it depicts the fluctuant exchange between two points. Unique among Ruscha's books, the pages of Sunset Strip are folded into themselves. To be read correctly the book must be unfolded to reveal a twenty-seven foot strip of facades composing a section of Sunset Boulevard from the 8000-block to the 9100. The bottom half of the page is the north side of the Strip, the top half being the south side. In order to read the book one's eyes must travel, turn around (literally flip the book around) and continue along the other side of the street. In creation and reception, Sunset Strip is a commute. The images were created with a camera mounted in the bed of a pick up truck, taken as Ruscha drove down the Strip and stopping every fifty feet or so [vi]. The images, taken during the day, capture only the facades of the buildings. Ignorance is given to cars or people, both of which are often cut in half between separate exposures. The imperfections of matching the facades are cracks along Ruscha's drive. Through these cracks we find Ruscha, not such an anonymous author after all. Splitting cars in two, and mismatching facades we become keenly aware of the passage of time. The facades of buildings may appear as stage sets but they are active points on other itineraries, anticipating future and past narratives. Then, as now, the Sunset Strip is a place that comes alive at night, when the house lights go down and the players make their appearance. An assumption can be made that Ruscha's images are vacant, as the only inhabitants are disregarded (cut-up). The road, however, is constant, as is Ruscha himself. Some facades are spliced while others are afforded an unobstructed view. We do not want to speculate as to the reason for this, but simply take from the formal decision that Ruscha was not stereotyping the city as a stage set without any backdrop, a "nothing," as he claimed [vii]. In his subtle technique, which is read by some as amateurization [viii], there is a sharp awareness of the geography of the city.

Ruscha's nothing of the Sunset Strip was a record of a common landscape. This became the facade of a between-space of the city not unlike any strip to be passed through on a typical commute of Los Angeles. However, this movement becomes a potential itinerary through the city that escapes any collective consensus of identity for the city. This is both Ruscha's trace through the city, his narrative movement, while an open invitation to create our own movement. Ruscha activates these facades, creating a corridor of facades that anticipates movement. The cracks between exposures become reference points of the itinerant movement of Ruscha through the space of the Strip. If Ruscha wanted this to be only his map, how he was viewing the Sunset Strip, perhaps he would have created a painting. As a book available to 5000 readers, Ruscha was inviting others into his movement, to experience his city, and formulate further itineraries. The book and its facades would be common between readers but their commute and narrative would be their own. Ruscha leaves us with only end papers and a space between them. Any relation to the facts (addresses and facades only) was purely on the individual level. The facades are only superficial information, like lines on a road map incomplete if not followed.

That Ed Ruscha would choose to document the landscape of greater Los Angeles in book form, printed in larger quantity than a typical artist's book, is a pointed comment on the lack of consensus for a common landscape. Sunset Strip encapsulates a form of greater Los Angeles that is a space defined purely through the individual movement within that space. The Sunset Strip does not become Sunset Strip without the itinerant trace of Ruscha himself. The book becomes a mapping of one single narrative line through greater Los Angeles, a single commute among many. How can we consider a landscape to be common when each of us commutes differently? The actions of Ruscha's book play on this. A community of individuals holds this landscape, the Strip as witnessed by Ruscha, in common. Yet the images within the book are only one depiction of the landscape they convey, serving as a single, not communal, map of the actual landscape. The actual Strip is traversed by millions of lines of individuals moving through it, none of which duplicates Ruscha's track. Though each reader holds this landscape, the book, in common, no two readings duplicate. Even the movement of Ruscha is not to be reformulated with the information provided by the book, his presence (his present-tense) is always definite. Despite this, we cannot know where and when his movements begin and end. Though he claims otherwise, by maintaining the façade-lined Strip is "nothing," Ruscha is photographing the trace of himself. He cannot escape the movement and time he spends in photographing as he drives back and forth commuting along the Strip on a sunny California afternoon. Capturing both sides of the street with a backdrop of same-sky, we are able to see both sides of the street from both sides of the street. Ruscha is not in the middle of the road, but on the side of the street. We should be able to see him, and in the cracks he is still there.

Ruscha's Sunset Strip not only epitomizes the itinerant form of greater Los Angeles as a commute space, it welcomes exchange and experience of Ruscha's commute through reading his itinerary along the Strip. Such exchange is crucial to Sunset Strip as well as his other books. These books often anticipated our recreation and individual exposition of lines he was drawing through greater Los Angeles. Some Los Angeles Apartments from 1965 invites vulnerability of the common landscape. The title advertises the arbitrariness of the subject matter and the images within. These could be any apartment buildings, though these are the ones Ruscha decided to photograph. Some residents of Los Angeles live in some Los Angeles apartments, each points on some itineraries. All residents know some Los Angeles apartments, Ruscha unveils what his sum of some is with the thought that we have known and will know some Los Angeles apartments in our commutes within the city. Like Apartments it would be false to assume Real Estate Opportunities (1970) as vacant images. Instead these are spaces of anticipation, voids waiting to be filled that were once inhabited. Ruscha, in photographing the lots, inhabits these spaces with his presence. The book opens these images up as spaces of anticipation, awaiting potential residents and readers to define these lots and experience Ruscha's itinerary. Furthermore Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles contains only thirty-one images, leaving the final three for individual projection and discovery. Arbitrarily mapping the city Ruscha gives the reader a series of points between his end papers, a single movement among many potential. These itineraries of Ruscha are maps acting as intersections, a site where our movements and his can intersect and exchange. With Sunset Strip we know that thousands of individual movements converge within this space for nightly debauchery (little has changed since 1966). Ruscha tears away this nocturnal commotion; he strips it to show the linear structure of the space itself. In the daylight the Strip is naked, its beauty and its blemishes become apparent and its character as a commute space, a stage of infinite moving bodies, becomes more palpable [ix]. Intersections signify facades of the landscape, presumably common, as points where itineraries of disparate individuals congregate and signify the same space differently. The supposed dedifferentiated facades of buildings belie their own heterogeneous reality.

Held in common the landscape of greater Los Angeles is transformed through the narrative of each individual commuting body. Following another's itinerary in a city alien to our own, their narrative mutates into our own. This exchange only enriches the weave of the urban web, celebrating its vastness of possibility. Though a presumptively common landscape is recorded and documented, each narrative reveals a different city. Mapped out, these recorded commutes activate landscapes as something other than what they are. These traces, such as Ruscha's, change our relation to the space we exist within. Itineraries provide first hand accounts of disparate landscapes, held within the same common space of greater Los Angeles, each transforming and renewing our relations to this space. When a building is torn down on the route taken from home to work, the city changes. Behind the facades of the commute lie other itineraries to be experienced. Perhaps we have forgotten. We are not the only individuals moving from point to point, there are millions of others, there always have been and will be many more. With traces left as itineraries, these narratives upon the common landscape reveal the web-form of locale, exchanged through the individualist experience. The untenability of greater Los Angeles lends itself to a topographic investigation as exemplified in Ruscha's books. In exchange such commutes as Ruscha's become locations of diverse happenings of narratives to be read and futures to be outlined. No single narrative overlays the urban web, no communal identity is certainly the identity of the city. A common landscape is now disparate landscapes, various narratives of infinite cities forming a polymorphous whole. If greater Los Angeles is to have an overall common identity, this identity will be the opening from which variant cities spread out in all dimensions, where the itinerant lines of individuals are exchanged and the legion of individual cities that create greater Los Angeles are revealed. Here we hold in uncommon each other's presumed common.

[i] As the reader will have noticed, I have made a point of using the expression 'greater Los Angeles,' an expression I share with Reyner Banham though he was not the source for my usage. For this study to insist upon the City of, or County of Los Angeles, would be to draw arbitrary lines; lines to which the fluid and continually weaving urban web does not attend. Greater Los Angeles is a mutating amoeba of the many cities and counties (and unincorporated areas) that are a part of a great contiguous whole not easy to delineate through arbitrary, political boundaries.
[ii] From the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau website. This appears to be the motto of the city, or at least the closest "official" motto I came across in my research. Nonetheless it is quite apt for the study at hand.
[iii] The common postmodern myth and debate around Los Angeles, as epitomized in writings by the aforementioned Davis, Jameson, or Soja revolves around issues of centricity/periphery. Condemning sprawl and nostalgic for Modern notions of a radial city, such debates remain stuck in search of an order framed through discreet space and centralized points of community, rather than a new order of linearity and movement that recognizes the individual creation of city as the reality of a polymorphous Los Angeles. Davis' schizophrenic vision (verging toward paranoia) reveals a chaotic, out of control vision of Los Angeles, as epitomized in his Ecology of Fear. Not too far off this are Edward Soja and Frederic Jameson who found Los Angeles as the epitome of Postmodernity, a space of capitalism run amok. Soja, in his essay "Taking Los Angeles Apart" attempts to centralize the city through a reading of it as exemplary of Bentham's famous panopticon prison, indeed defining Los Angeles as a controlled "sixty mile circle." Furthermore Frederic Jameson has quite famously, in his Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, read Los Angeles as the dystopic and chaotic end of a postmodern world. I would oppose such readings of Los Angeles as chaos to Reyner Banham, a significant influence on my study, who's writings on Los Angeles (cited elsewhere) remain open to finding a new and unique order of Los Angeles that is not postmodern.
[iv] "I had liked the anonymity of the whole thing... each book has an anonymity, a sort of pureness." Ed Ruscha, interview by Lewis McAdams, "Catching up with Ed Ruscha," ed. Alexandra Schwartz, Leave any Information at the Signal (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002) 239.
[v] The original edition of Every Building on the Sunset Strip cost $7.50, about $40 by today's standards. Of course the books now sell from $300 - $1500 on the secondary market, becoming an antithesis to their original intention. By all accounts the books sold rather quickly and were unavailable about as soon as they were printed. Yet an edition of 5000 is quite large for the specialty market of photographic art books.
[vi] Neal Benezra and Kenny Brougher, Ed Ruscha (Zurich: Scalo, 2000) 205. All the details regarding Sunset Strip refer to the information provided in Ed Ruscha where they have listed the complete editions, sizes and small anecdotes regarding the publications.
[vii] "It's like a Western town in a way. A store-front plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing." Ed Ruscha, interview with David Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher [or All Booked Up]," ed. Alexandra Schwartz, Leave any Information at the Signal (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002) 43.
[viii] Jeff Wall speaks of Ruscha's books under this heading, which is "the issue of the de-skilling and re-skilling of the artist in a context defined by the culture industry, and made controversial by aspects of Pop art." From "Marks of Indifference," ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995) 248.
[ix] Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas attempts similar clarity with the Las Vegas Strip. Appropriately they make reference to Ruscha, the precursor to their investigation, as they perform an " 'Edward Ruscha' elevation of the Strip." (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977) 32.

Glowlab is pleased to present the writings of Los Angeles independent curator Chris Balaschak, who recently produced the Itineraries exhibition at Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica. The show, which included the work of Glowlab's Christina Ray, was featured in the Los Angeles Times and Artforum.com. A review of the exhibition will appear in the October issue of Artweek. The following text accompanied the exhibition, and we will publish it in three parts. Included here is part one; part two will be published on September 15, and part three on October 1.

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Itineraries, part one
by Chris Balaschak

Spiders, Webs

In late 2001 three entomologists met at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. One in residence at USC, one a curator at the museum, and one a museum volunteer, the three formed a critical mass of similar interest. This common interest was purely entomological, a desire for spiders. The three colleagues sought to study spiders in greater Los Angeles, but the problem was how to go about this goal in such an ambitiously large area. The area, a vast and sprawling urban topography, is one part each desert, mountain, beach, and grassland. The natural environment is one of juxtapositions, not to mention the infections of global culture and economy. The solution was to create a local survey asking 'citizen scientists' to bring in the spiders they found in their homes, gardens and workplaces - no spider denied. The project, which originally was scheduled to last only one year, has spun its own web as collection continues now in 2004 with data continually being processed. The doors of the entomology department are always open to those wanting to bring spiders in, and the annual Insect Fair is the major cultivation point.

The Los Angeles Spider Survey has been far-reaching, accepting spiders of all species from every point in the greater Los Angeles basin. Heading the project, Assistant Curator Dr. Brian Brown set a very pragmatic goal for the survey - to study spiders of the region while deepening the local specimen collection of the Museum. Like any great field research, the project has extended in time and space and, after processing data and collecting specimens, interesting results occur [1]. The project suggested a liberated form of geographical investigation, whereby the survey could serve as a map able to open the landscape of greater Los Angeles. This map would express the complexity of the landscape while creating an intersection that becomes the museum's community. The spiders act as a mapping device to reveal another city, of an immense spider population, in a landscape one would presume to know. Assumptions aside, this map permeated greater Los Angeles revealing to its inhabitants that spiders of all exotic and common qualities, non-native and native, were hiding in wait throughout the city [2].

The movements and exchanges of the citizen scientists drew this map that revealed both a diverse spider population as well as the lines between the citizen and the museum. Currently in process, Dr. Brown is planning to have all data composed to create a demographic map of the spider population of Los Angeles. Different sites in the city become nodes from which spiders were brought in heavy numbers- the centers of the spider city may appear to be as multi-centered as the human city. The Spider Survey divulged this other Los Angeles, a city of spiders, insinuating the unlimited potential cities awaiting similar projects. Drawing on a variety of individual interactions with the landscape, and with other fellow citizens, such a geographical investigation as the Spider Survey delineates the impossibility of creating a singular and common image of greater Los Angeles, revealing the site as susceptible to infinite mappings.

One node of heavily concentrated spiders was particularly illuminating to the Museum and the inhabitants of the region. In discovering a large population of brown widow spiders in the yard of a Torrance public school, this node was exposed to Los Angeles' human population. Literally nesting beneath benches outside the school the find was shocking, and perhaps terrifying to parents, as the lethal brown widow was known to inhabit only a distinct territory of East Africa [3]. Most likely the spiders made their way to Torrance through the port of Los Angeles at Long Beach, a major mouth feeding the United States with innumerable shipments of cargo, acknowledged or not, arriving daily from all points on the globe [4]. This shock should not surprise, especially in an era of global migrations between dense and diverse cities where goods, services and cultures know no geographical border. Greater Los Angeles is particularly exemplary of such capricious quality. As the Spider Survey imparts, there are as many centers to this city, as many cities in this city, as there are populations that live within its confines. Though many Angelinos have the Los Angeles County Thomas Guide (a common road map) on hand at all times to help guide them through the city, this is but one map of the variant paths, and potential cities, interweaving throughout. The Thomas Guide may lay down the common paths and routes bisecting the city, but it is not the city itself. This road map is a limited number of experiential cities, only an indication of the many paths and cities to be known in the area of greater Los Angeles. The Spider Survey maps one potential city, a city both distant and distinct to greater Los Angeles; one city among many that creates the complex urban web of the region.

Movement, as seen in both the migration into the city of spiders and that of citizens from their backyards to the museum, is crucial in understanding and describing the polymorphous structure of greater Los Angeles. Movement permeates greater Los Angeles, marking its surface mutable. Each commute across the city, the movement of the individual back and forth between points, sets its own borders for the city. The state of greater Los Angeles is that of dislocation and commotion, a space of individuals commuting on numerous paths. Such movement is the mark of the global city as Walter Benjamin made note of this arising in 19th century Paris, with its "rootless populations of big cities" [5]. Yet greater Los Angeles is even further exemplary of the rootless population; it is defined by the space of commuting, by the lines of individuals moving across its surface between points such as home and work. In greater Los Angeles especially, these points of home and work are unbound to a common centricity (as suburb to downtown). The commute is a line of circulation between points, while not statically bound to these points. Unlike Paris, Los Angeles is quite a young city and has matured with commuting already built into its growth. Though greater Los Angeles is often associated with the commute upon the freeway, which became a national occurrence during the post-World War II boom of suburbia, "the freeway system is the third or fourth transportation diagram drawn on a map that is a deep palimpsest of earlier methods of moving about the basin" [6]. Freeway commutes lay atop the lines of regional and national railroad lines, Spanish trade routes, and ancient native footpaths, each instilling in the region a sense of transmigration. Greater Los Angeles is uniquely this commute-space, a space of variant lines of movement between many potential points. These points are each intersections, and each does not conform to oppositional terms of suburban/urban or periphery/center with which cities such as Benjamin's Paris often contend.

However, the dream of suburbia was, and is, the reality of greater Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a site where every family could dream of owning a home with a yard - notably different than Benjamin's Paris born out of a crowded medieval urban core. The cunning marketing of real estate lords, in conjunction with clever railroad barons, made this dream reality for millions in the early 20th century, sprawling Los Angeles across the basin west to the Pacific, east to the desert, north to San Gabriel Mountains and south to Long Beach. Yet the breadth of such a spread created a space of variant lines with disparate intersections of the growing population, each intersection adding to a loss of centricity for the city. A patchwork of neighborhoods, each with main streets, became numerous crowded intersections dispossessing the centricity of the city at large. Rather than travel to a central space that the majority of citizens commute to, the greater Los Angeles commuter draws a line between many possible points. The commuter does not necessarily commute from a peripheral suburb to a central downtown but rather between many possible locations of home and work. Center and periphery have ceased to be issues in the geography of greater Los Angeles, as "Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense" [7]. The loss of the issue of center against periphery leads to a model of equivalence where each commute line, every individual movement, is equal in defining the layers of greater Los Angeles' web-like palimpsest.

Reyner Banham's "commonly accepted" city is that of London and a European urban model (equally applicable to cities such as New York or Boston, to cite examples in the United States). Such a model is focused on the creation of central intersections and radial lines leading out toward the periphery of the city, creating clear distinction between center and periphery, between a downtown and its suburbs. Greater Los Angeles is a city of linearity, a commute-space of movement between points of equivalence, not between opposing poles of center and periphery. Commonly attributed as chaotic and a "sprawling low-density single-family house monoculture," [8] these claims are nostalgic for antiquated city forms of "the commonly accepted sense." Greater Los Angeles reveals a new order of urban form, a form of complexity due to the intricate itinerant motions of individual lines throughout the city. Greater Los Angeles is web where commutes can be traced to reveal the complexity of individual movements, opening potential paths for past and future experiences within the city; where the intersections of lines in the web become exchanges of these individual cities between citizens. To uncover this itinerant geography is to expose the complexity of greater Los Angeles and its move away from the assumed identities of urban form.

Intrinsic to such a web-form is the impossibility of creating a singular image or perspective from which to encapsulate the city. Without center, greater Los Angeles is also without a definitive public face, a single image to commonly define the city. Though the Thomas Guide seeks to understand and make sense of the city's surface it too remains perpetually out of date and incomplete. No single map can suffice to capture the entirety of the city. The Spider Survey here is telling, as it is reliant on the movement of individuals, in the collection of spiders, to create an overall form of greater Los Angeles. The Survey is a continual and never complete, mutating for each new exchange of spider between citizen and museum. The borders of the Spider City shift for each new movement within. The Survey is reliant on the commute space of the city - the movement of the individual to and from the museum, as well as the exchange (the commute) of spider to the museum.

The discovery of the brown widow spider population caused a bit of hysteria in the local news. This hysteria was due to the unearthing of such an immense population of potentially dangerous spiders in a common landscape of the city. What could be a more common point on the map of the city than a public elementary school? The Survey presents the reality behind these common façades, that they are only a face, a front, to the building behind. That in this building behind a presumed common front, there lay many potential cities within greater Los Angeles to be discovered. The freeways and roadways of greater Los Angeles are presumed public space, yet here there are divergent faces of various linear movements, narratives of infinite cities. Dr. Brian Brown called the brown widow discovery "eye opening," as if we all were blind. The common landscape became something new, a place where deadly spiders played beneath benches of school children, where the assumed narrative of the city revealed unexpected stories of other cities.

Though a map unveils an edifice that underlies a landscape, no map can tell the entirety of a given landscape. By definition maps focus on the particular in signifying a whole while not being that whole. Maps represent an intersection of public landscape and private experience where, for example, the road map shows us the routes one can travel, but does not reveal the individual experience. A map can signify any potential itinerary within a landscape, any experience of the city, and city within a city. Furthermore a map, a substructure to a landscape, is revealing about the composition of that city, signifying an unknown in the landscape as a place to be discovered. The Spider Survey acts as such a map, a city previously unknown in an all but presumed common landscape. Though the commute space remains perhaps the most public space of greater Los Angeles, a space to which a majority of its citizens can relate (as it is so central to life in the metro area), it is defined through private association and individual lines. The memories and futures of the city lie dormant in the commute space, a space of hidden lines left from various itinerant bodies. These itineraries await exchange with other bodies to unveil the commute space as a site of many potential cities to be experienced.

The freeways of Los Angeles, and its many roads and pathways, are a landscape presumed to be common. Yet as each individual commute traces its own path, the common landscape is forever distant from the individual landscapes that link together in the continually forming web of a polymorphous Los Angeles. Richard Sennett has referred to the city formed through commutes as having "fragmented geography," a landscape in which "the logistics of speed... detach the body from the spaces through which it moves" [9]. Sennett explicitly refers to this reality as an effect of a city constantly commuting, "each fragment has its specified function - home, shopping, office, school - segmented by empty patches from other fragments" [10]. The space between each fragment is indefinite, it is a space to which we have no direct relation and therefore cannot signify as a place, it is a between-space. Yet this space is the only common space between the individuals commuting in the city. Exterior to private interiors the commute space is the common landscape, where each individual projects upon different, at times divergent, trajectories. The individual relations to the space passed through are indirect, as we do not identify ourselves with them, yet we assume these spaces are the common landscape of greater Los Angeles. The individual relates to home, work, school, etc., but the individual does not relate to the space between these points, it is a space of façades only. If no one is relating to the places they pass, is there a loss of direct relation to the commute space that obscures all landscapes? To positively answer such a question would be to maintain greater Los Angeles as a fragmented place, a place without direct relations. Instead, greater Los Angeles is a place of infinite relations to the space surrounding it, infinite as relative to the numerous movements of commuting bodies along all possible routes at all possible speeds.

Greater Los Angeles is this space of limitless individual places traced as linear commutes, each individual relaying, projecting and anticipating their place as they traverse the surface of the city. The narrative between these points, the linear movements of the commute back and forth, are the space of many potential cities to be exchanged between individuals. The commute space has, in greater Los Angeles, become this new common space that is always uncommon between individual movements, each individual forming the city along their commute. In a convergence of lines, intersections such as the Spider Survey become substructures for community relations. The web of greater Los Angeles is built upon such intersections.

[1] I interviewed Dr. Brown on January 15, 2004 regarding the project. The project was simply as pragmatic as I portray it here. The implications for curatorial methods and practice went far beyond the simple goals of the Survey, as did the resulting discoveries of non-native species.
[2] Dr. Brown mentioned to me that you are never further than 5 meters away from a spider in any landscape.
[3] The brown widow has also been discovered in Southeastern Australia in recent decades.
[4] Since this discovery the Survey project has taken into account the profound global influence on the native spider population of greater Los Angeles. The website, www.nmh.org, for the 2004 Survey makes the discussion and investigation of this globalism one of the key tenets for the project.
[5] Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," trans. Edmund Jephcott, Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 158. Originally published 1955.
[6] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) 57.
[7] Ibid.
[8] James Howard Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere (New York: Simone & Schuster, 1993) 213.
[9] Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York: WW Norton, 1994) 365-366.
[10] Ibid., 366.

By Holly Tavel
Neuroscape Editor

At the City Reliquary on Grand Street in Williamsburg, handwritten directions scrawled in a vertical column down one side of the building's brick face provide lost, wandering souls with a helpful map of the territory, offering directions to/from the major landmarks (McCarren Park, the Bridge) and intersections (this way to Bedford, Metropolitan, Roebling). "For the people" reads a sign lettered above windows crammed with lovingly arranged displays of eyecandy junk --penny collections, crumbling statuary, plants in bathtubs-- and indeed, there is something about this unasked-for, impromptu street guide that embodies a certain indefatigable generosity of spirit. It's the impulse towards community reduced to its basic unit. This is cartography at its most lo-fi: words on a wall. Signs and symbols used to aid, to direct, to point out, to show the way, anonymously and free to all, and to say to whoever makes use of it: you are here.

There's something more here than just a warm-and-fuzzy random act of kindness, however. As a personal take on mapping the immediate landscape, the City Reliquary's DIY signage serves not only as a guidepost for the direction-impaired, but signals what matters in the surrounding environment. And like graffiti, it seeks autonomy, a way of personalizing that environment.

At a time in which our everyday landscape is increasingly mediated and ad-saturated, in which we slog daily through a densely cluttered visual and sonic landscape of loudly competing messages, it comes as no surprise that more and more artists are looking for ways to simplify, make sense of, and organize the chaos rather than simply to add to it; and to find ways to use commercial symbols and language in individual, personal ways. At the same time though, technology blurs these distinctions, and there are tensions between where one ends and the other begins.

If street art and handmade signage are the no-tech end of the spectrum, then groups like Proboscis inhabit the extreme other end, one among a diverse array of artists, new media companies, researchers and psychogeographers exploring how technology --especially wireless-- can offer new ways of interacting with and marking the landscape. Proboscis' website asks the following questions:
How are our visions and understandings of landscape created and how do they affect the way we then alter the landscape to fit that vision?
How do communication technologies affect our perceptions of territory?
In what ways are languages tied to experiences of the landscapes their speakers inhabit ?

The YellowArrow project offers a unique example of an ambitious, expansive project that explores some of these questions. It blurs the line between public and private space, between the lowest of lo-fi and the possibilities afforded by technology. Using one of the simplest and most universally recognizable graphic symbols --so ubiquitous it seems to have always existed -- a loose-knit group of artists, promoters, and new media types aims to saturate the environment in an effort to create "real-life hyperlinks" and a way for people to interact with the environment in new ways.

The idea is why-didn't-I-think-of-that simple: paper Yellow Arrow stickers printed with the word "counts" and an ID number are strategically distributed; participants use the stickers to "tag" points of interest or places of personal significance, and use the ID number to leave a short note, directive, or anecdote which others can read by typing the number into THEIR phones. The bright yellow stickers are all about visibility: they effectively create a visual plane upon which seemingly random things are grouped together at a remove from the surrounding environs. A favorite deli, a park bench that affords a particularly beautiful view, a piece of funny graffiti that might go unnoticed, these are the kinds of things that might be singled out. The arrows function as a kind of visual annotation, a header or footnote, a labelling of some particular element as “special” -- in some way, to someone, somewhere.

I spoke to two of the artists involved in the project; their desire to remain anonymous brings up another concern: issues of authorship. The Yellow Arrow looks like a great equalizer -- it's a tool to be used, that's all, a way to foster communication and collaboration; it's about whatever individuals decide to do with it. No doubt it could be ideal as a simple form of advertising or promotion for someone's space or event; but it's uniquely suited to the creation of real-time, real-life narratives, and possesses fascinating potential --hopefully to provoke amazing stories, observations, images, and memories.

[note: If you're in NYC next week, pick up YellowArrows and participate in the project: details here.

By Holly Tavel
Neuroscape Editor

The Little Fugitive (1953, Dir. Morris Engel)

In honor of this week’s annual Mermaid parade down Surf Avenue, hunt down a copy of this thoroughly original and engaging little movie displaying Coney Island in all its glory, as perfect an evocation of place as has ever been commited to film. Universally lauded and credited with inspiring both the nascent American indy movement and the French New Wave (by none other than Francois Truffaut), The Little Fugitive is a film suffused with raw charm and innocence, merging the blunt realism of a home movie with an arty sense of space and eye for telling detail.

Saul Bellow wrote about The Little Fugitive that its visual style had the ability to "penetrate the hard surfaces of appearances, make the stones eloquent, cause subways and pavements to cry out to us, the millions of dead in clumsily marked rows to influence us." Francois Truffaut credited it with inspiring the French New Wave (it very clearly inspired Albert Lamorisse’s revered children’s film The Red Balloon, which came out three years later). Coming at a time when Hollywood artifice was at its peak, when back-alley street scenes were comprised of sets contructed on backlots (and look it), The Little Fugitive, with its cast of amateurs, and low-budget grit, was a stark and shocking slice of near-documentary realism.

Groundbreaking in technique yet enagaging on the simplest levels, it concerns a day in the life of eight year old Joey, who, tricked by some neighborhood boys into believing he’s killed his older brother, runs away to Coney Island , where (his concern over his brother notwithstanding) he wanders the boardwalk, relishing his newfound freedom, through shifting and seemingly unlimited vistas of distraction and delight. We stay in Joey’s point of view throughout, experience each moment as he does, going where he goes. With the singlemindedness only a little kid can have, he spends a lot of time financing his boardwalk exploits by cashing in empty bottles he collects along the beach. Mostly eschewing dialogue for fragments of overheard conversation, the murmurous chaos of crowd sounds, the rumble of coasters and an off-kilter harmonica tune, the film achieves an almost meditative sense of calm admid Coney's nonstop swirl of vendors and barkers, sunbathers and swirling sand and garish neon, and the laughter and sherieks from the midway.

With its themes of lostness, exile and alienation, and attention to the small and everyday, it has a slightly existentialist flavor. But The Little Fugitive is mostly about Joey's --and the viewer's-- interaction with his environment, about movement and invisibility, about being a part of and apart from the world in which it locates itself. The viewer has the eerie sense of passing unnoticed through conversations and jostling crowds, an effect achieved by Engels' pioneering use of an early form of Steadicam strapped to one shoulder; it allowed him to get shots from weird angles, keeping us in Joey's zigzagging point of view throughout. But mostly, in a film that captures it at a specific moment in time, we get a sense of Coney Island as a place both undeniably real and mythic.

Ryan sends us images and thoughts about memory and history-- lingering voices in a California valley.

On July 17, 1769 a Spanish exploration party, lead by Gaspar de Portol, descended into a little valley that was formed by the Buena Vista Creek in what is now Carlsbad, California. I live just up the hill from that little valley, two hundred and thirty-five years later.

That night in 1769, the party camped on the western slope of the valley. There was a water source close by, and good grazing grass for the animals. Father Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest who left a careful record of the expedition, wrote this: "We saw from camp a village of the heathen on the summit of a hill." The Indians they saw that day were later named the Luiseños, after the nearby San Luis Rey Mission. Stories float around these days about an archaeological site right in that same valley which was destroyed in the 1960s, before law required developers to record and collect artifacts that were left by Indians. The site was allegedly an old village, and as the story goes there were dump trucks full of artifacts that were hauled away. It is unclear where they were all taken; there are no records beyond hearsay. And what happened to the people? There were other villages as well.

The path that was taken by that group of Spanish explorers has been memorialized as El Camino Real. Taking that same road these days, descending into the same little valley you will run into the Carlsbad Mall.
It is built right on top of that old Indian village that was once in the valley. On the same land where Indians used to live for thousands of years, there are now countless clothing stores and restaurants jammed under one massive roof.

Times change.

Sometimes I walk around down by the mall, and by the Buena Vista Lagoon (which is southwest of the mall). I try to imagine what it used to look like around there 235 years ago, and long before. The Historical Society in town has a compilation of the early history of the City of Carlsbad, including descriptions of old houses and structures. There is no mention of any places where the Luiseño Indians and their ancestors once lived.

History, for the most part, has pushed the Indians aside and erased their memory. I have lived here since I was 11 years old (17 years), and I never heard anything about the people who lived here before the Spanish arrived. They were never mentioned in any of my "history" classes. Interesting. History, it seems, is not all inclusive.

They were here. Their marks have not been fully eradicated.

According to the cartographer Miguel Costanso, those Indians near the Buena Vista Creek were fully aware that the Spanish were coming. In fact, the Indians greeted the newcomers in large numbers.
I wonder how they felt that day in 1769 as the Spanish foreigners traversed into their little valley.

Did they know then that things would never be the same again?

Eric Van Hove is a Belgian artist, born in Algeria, and currently living in Japan. His work defies easy categorization, incorporating drawing, sculpture, psychogeography, installations, land arts, and investigations into the act of writing as both symbol and context. In 2001 Van Hove was awarded the Monbukagakusho Research Scholarship to Japan in order to learn traditional Asian calligraphy. He is currently engaged as an MA researcher in Tokyo Gakugei University, studying Japanese calligraphy pedagogy and classics, as well as the continuing practice of writing (Shosha). His lovely, strange, and evocative installations involving texts chalked on floors and walls or scratched in sand remind us of the possibilities of language not as vehicle, but as starting point and destination.

The following excerpts from text pieces submitted by Van Hove to Glowlab illuminate Tokyo in the form of letters written to friends --the psychogeographic epistolary. Half poem, half prose, they offer glimpses into the psychic landscape of that most foreign and familiar of cities.

Correspondence IV. Tokyo, June 10, 2001

Dear Dominique,

Japanese are sleeping.
At the seam, pedestrian’s passage
At the zones of ebb tide, of the crowd, there sometimes the nervous stream of
displacements bring them immobile as in a shock, because
in peace for some minutes, in a bus or on a train, Japanese are sleeping.

It has always appeared to me that they do more than rest, heads tipped by their own weight, heavy cheeks, disabused heroes of of tiresome modernities. Propped on obstacles that serve as supports, it is really the drowsiness that surprises them, suspends them.
Rocking with the swells of the finally accented constraints. Pitching with the regular disillusions, by the rubbing of their intimacy with those of others, always numerous, they are sent to sleep, their spirit glossed, peaceful with their drowned faces.

The great Kabuki master Nakamura Tomijuro is supposed to have said, “You should never reveal tiredness of effort, because the art of acting must be similar to the clothing of the celestial creators: invisible seams.

The seams of modern Japan are visible, and its creators have only celestial refection of the human condition’s infinite tragedy, daily and unnoticed as the bauty of a pool of water.

Another echo of what they call here “monono aware” (the poignant beauty of things) and that Christine Buci-Glucksman called “New Icarism” in her book “The Aesthetic of Time in Japan”
The time to sleep.

I think I am remembering that Merleau-Ponty sewed eroticism in a collar that yawns.
In the same way I voluntarily admit finding immanence in the ring-eyed faces,
the abused foreheads and the tired spines of this modern folk of Amaterasu.

In Friendship,

Correspondence V. Tokyo, June 26, 2001

Hello Pierre,

Here are some words.
You had told me that Japan “doesn’t please” you.
I must acknowledge that it pleases me more and more.
The light of the streets in evening is quite particular, the materials used here, which proceed until the infinity of the banal, reflected in a strange manner, soft, absent,
almost incredible.

The form of the streets “make” sculpture.
Something proportional.
To what...I don’t know exactly.
There are a lot of earthquakes here, as you know.
That has consequences for urbanism: houses don’t touch each other,
they skirt each other.
It is without a doubt a precaution; if a house falls apart, its neighbor inevitably does not.
moreover, movement is possible when separated.
This forms some very beautiful places: slits between houses, interstices, houses like spread legs.
These spaces are truly sculptural.
Too narrow for one to pass through, too wide for one to forget, too practical for one to discard.
Some bitter herbs, doubtless respected in this Asian country like in many others, end up growing there, inaccessibly.
Most astonishing or logical (maybe it’s the same) is that it appears to me that it goes with Japanese people as with their houses: a space is to be found in between them that makes one guess, a rumbling.

In friendship,

See and read more of Eric Van Hove’s work here

By Holly Tavel
Neuroscape Editor

In 1956, in Alba, Italy, the painter/architect Constant Nieuwenhuis visited an encampment of Gypsies on land given to them by the landowner, painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio. Constant’s subsequent project, a scheme for a permanent encampment for the Gypsies of Alba, engendered his initial ideas about New Babylon, a visionary city much more than a city, a radical utopia whose revolutionary conception of architecture, urbanism and space was inseparable from the political and social polemics that informed it.

New Babylon: a camp for nomads on a planetary scale, a city without borders, without boundaries, a mutable, infinitely malleable environment of shifting planes and vistas, a world where human beings, released from the prison of work and consumption, of industrialized leisure, are free to express their deepest desires and fundamental creativity, creating the world anew each day.

In The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architecture from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (copyright 1999, The Drawing Center), Catherine de Zegher writes, “Constant seems to have conceived of an urban model that literally envisaged the world wide web...Constant’s project represents a spatialization of a virtual world, where people can move, meet, and interact anytime, anywhere. As an unlimited communication system, the work is as radical as ever...”

Constant’s vision of a future society where all labor is taken care of by a vast underground automated network, thus freeing man to live a life in which imagination is actualized, today seems impossibly utopian. Within a labyrinthine network of enormous, multileveled interior spaces floating above the ground on support columns, interconnected sectors spreading and branching organically over the whole of the earth, inhabitants move through the city on foot, reconfiguring the movable walls and adding or subtracting elements at whim. In this way daily life becomes a kind of mass architectural game, a collective creative act displacing traditional forms of art altogether. Spontaneity, adventure, creativity, whimsicality, and openness are not this society’s exception but its rule. New Babylon challenges the stasis and fixed dwelling spaces of high-modernist architecture and subverts traditional notions of community, domesticity, and urban space. But perhaps more importantly, it questions the very nature of a society built on a foundation of work, hierarchy, and class.

In an era of increasing homogeneity marked by a decline in, as de Zegher puts it, "the capacity to imagine the world any differently" (p.11), New Babylon reminds us how very important, how necessary it is to hold on to these alternate visions, to question and challenge all assumptions about space, community, art, and architecture, and shows, unequivocally, just how profoundly these things affect all of us.

By Holly Tavel
Neuroscape Editor

In what may (or may not, basically depending on my mood) become a regular feature of Neuroscape, Ill look at films which should be (says me) in every psychogeographers video collection. The first installment looks at a truly weird, obscure little gem which takes us on a surreal journey through the bucolic suburban wasteland of Westchester county, mid-life-crisis style.

The Swimmer (1968, Dir. Frank Perry)
From the opening scene, in which a bare-chested Burt Lancaster emerges from a pastorale of serene wildlife and wafting sunlight and, in a running dive, penetrates the placid blue of a swimming pool at the peak of a Marvin Hamlisch symphonic crescendo, I'm hooked. A late-sixties curio awash with the heady surrealism so characteristic of that era, it veers unsteadily between Hollywood overstatement (the aforementioned Hamlisch score) and arty abstraction most evident in the abundance of weird, ponderous dialogue: "Beautiful--like a dream city from the bow of a ship..."; "the ash tree...the last to get its leaves...and then first to lose them", &c. The scenes of late-summer woods, sunlight filtering through patchwork leaves, are straight off those 500-piece puzzle boxes that sat collecting dust in your basement, and there's a ten-minute sequence of soft-focus montage that today evokes nothing so much as an extended seventies feminine hygiene commercial.

The plot, based on John Cheever's celebrated short story, concerns the mid-life crisis of one Ned Merrill, the quintessential man in the gray flannel suit, expressed in his spontaneous decision, on a hungover Sunday, to swim the eight miles to his home via the connecting chain of his wealthy neighbors' swimming pools. Oh, Ned, you old so-and-so, you can hear the hung-over Westerhazys thinking as they sip the hair of the dog poolside and playfully chide his impetuous, little-kid bravado. As Ned endeavors to swim a river of pools -- the Lucinda river, he names it, after his conspicuously absent wife-- the film turns episodic. He frolics across rolling countryside, racing a horse, barefoot and naked except for shiny black swim trunks, exuding manly-man grace and athleticism gone to ruin. Neighbors slap him on the back and wonder where in the sam hill he's been keeping himself. A former babysitter, the picture of dewy innocence, comes along for part of the ride, and reveals her preteen crush on him. The scene's layered abstraction heightens what we've already come to suspect: his daydream is no longer the stuff of summer reverie, but of amnesiac delusion. At big blowout #2 (people falling into the pool with their clothes on, everyone winking at everyone else's wives, Pucci and golf shirts in abundance) party crasher Ned is clearly unwelcome; unpleasantness transpires. His triumphant stride becomes a limp, he deteriorates before our eyes. Each pool becomes a touchstone in Ned's transformation from conquering hero of the bourgeois party-set to washed-up loser. Each one a reminder of squandered opportunity, each belonging to another life with another set of rules and players that seem completely unconnected with Ned yet intrinsically bound to him. One of the film's strangest scenes comes when Ned encounters a forlorn little boy sitting (and playing a flute: my, how times change) on the edge of an empty, leaf-strewn pool. Far from acknowleding the drained pool as an insurmountable obstacle in his lighthearted-jaunt-turned-obsessive-quest, he (with the young boy in tow) simply goes through the motions, literally, of swimming it; the two breast- and backstroke the air the length of the pool and back. Ned: "If you believe it, then it's true for you." Indeed.

The swimming-pool-as-metaphor featured heavily in another film The Swimmer evokes in its portrayal of the empiness of upper-middle-class suburbia: The Graduate. The river of pools in The Swimmer alludes not only to Ned's self-immersion but his alcoholism (a fact much more evident in Cheevers story). From a psychogeographic view, Ned's decision to take the odd way home is tantamount to the discovery of a secret passageway cutting clear through the center of his life, affording glimpses of the hidden vistas not only in his life but in the landscape around him. The minute he opens this magic door, he unleashes the forces of poetry and memory. Once he has consented to this point of view, there's no turning back; he has to continue, no matter what.

hidden passageways . secret gardens . lonely byways . staircases that lead to nowhere . aimless wanderings . spontaneous jaunts . interdimensional travelogues . symbols and signs . landscapes that won't just simmer down and be quiet .

Neuroscape is a collaborative environment, an individual and collective musing on the places - real and imagined - that we interact with, informed by personal narratives and investigations into what it could all possibly mean. While we're working on our next feature, we'd like to take a moment and invite you to send submissions to Neuroscape. We're mainly interested in original journalistic/critical writing and photography that addresses the subject of psychogeography from a unique and intensely personal angle. However, if you have a drawing, a work of fiction, poetry, visual poetry, etc., or something that fails to fit neatly into the above categorizations but that you feel is particularly relevant, send it on (along with a few words of explanation) and we'll be happy to consider it. Written pieces should be no more than 500 words; photography/visual pieces should be sent in JPEG format and limited to 1 MB. There are no deadlines for submission, as we publish work as we receive it; we'll notify you by email (within a couple of weeks) whether the piece is accepted and if editorial changes/revisions are necessary.

For submissions to Neuroscape, contact Editor Holly Tavel: tavel [at] glowlab.com.

By Felix Q. Varga
Glowlab Agent-at-Large

There’s this guy Ted. You know him. Everyone knows a Ted, if they think about it hard enough. Ted might be your little brother, the guy who sold your dad overpriced life insurance, a friend of a friend, that obnoxious guy who works in your office who doesn’t seem to do anything, some schmo you got set up with once on a blind date. Only this Ted, this specific Ted, he doesn’t know he’s Ted. He thinks he’s someone else. Someone with a particular history, in a particular place, at a particular time, out having a drink with a friend on a Friday night in the East Village. He is by all accounts happy, comfortable, and secure in his non-Tedness. Well, you may say, that’s just nutty. OF COURSE he’s Ted. Is Ted perhaps suffering from a personality disorder of some kind, you ask? Is he crazy? Or just stubborn? Why won’t he acknowledge his Tedness?

From out of nowhere come a group of strangers bearing gifts. Gift certificates, to be more exact. And clapping him on the back and saying, “Happy Birthday, Ted!” A cause for celebration! A party! The strangers are not smelly or visibly deranged; they seem normal enough folks, well-groomed, jocular, even attractive. Why are they, then,doing this to poor Ted? Insisting he’s someone he’s not? Trying to give him presents, crying “Speech! Speech!” Maybe Ted's the sane one, and the strangers are the crazy ones. Who can tell anymore? A cake is produced. The friendly, laughing group gathers around, with no other purpose than to show Ted a good time.

But Ted isn’t having it. He keeps insisting he’s this other person, he’s NOT Ted, never heard of a Ted, and the people before him are unmitigated assholes. “What’s the matter with Ted?” the saddened partygoers want to know, shaking their heads. “He was never like this before; what happened”? I should know; I was one of those people, uncomfortable and antsy in that way you can only be when your well-meaning intentions are summarily rebuffed. “Man. Ted”s changed.”

Ted is on to us; he’s not playing along with our little game, our joke. He lets us no in no uncertain terms that he wishes we would go away, and maybe we should. After all,
if that’s what Ted wants...

But slowly, something begins to change. Ted begins to see the light. He is starting to get it. He’s playing pool with his newfound friends, a grin on his face. Enjoying a frosty alcoholic beverage (or ten). Eating some of the (delicious) cake. Who could have
predicted such a thing? He started out the evening as one person, and ended it as someone else. A drink in a bar with a friend, and now he has thirty friends. He began the evening empty-handed, and now has $300 worth of gift certificates redeemable for fine quality merchandise from Best Buy and Barnes and Noble locations nationwide.

And a fresh new identity to boot.

He has embraced his inner Tedness.

Is identity just a state of mind? That is, alas, a question too deep for this writer to answer. Ask Michel Foucault, ask Luther Blissett, ask Madonna. I admit that sometimes I, Felix Q. Varga, have moments - ponderous, navel-gazing moments - when I wonder if in fact I’m not just a figment of someone’s imagination, a marionette beholden to the every whim of some shadowy, deranged puppetmaster.

But if you see Ted, tell him Felix says hi, and that he is an inspiration to at least one person.

For Ted is nothing if not proof positive that it is possible to have one’s cake and eat it too, and that inside each of us lurks a Ted; we have only to acknowledge it, to say yes to it, to bring it out into the light where it may shine, in all its glorious, inimitable Tedness, for the world to see.

For more about Ted’s birthday, click here

By Holly Tavel, Neuroscape Editor
Photographs by Peter Lasell

“ ...a conversation with a group of strangers in a stalled elevator...an appointment with nobody...a long walk for no reason...no umbrella in a rainstorm...finding the benign in a world of threats...listening to a tall tale with an open mind...the fluid experience that surrounds the things you can describe.”

So waxes the TRYST manifesto, outlining a four-day series of performances/public-space interventions that took place, courtesy of cmlperformance (www.cmlperformance.org), at various locations around the city. I’d love to be able to tell you about all of them, but I was unfortunately only able to make it to the last one, a two-hour derive through Chinatown on a day so beautiful it mocked my sorry-ass, coffee-addled self. I’m not kidding. You know the kind of day that absolutely demands that you get out from behind your desk or computer and out of your dark and dreary apartment and go out and do something? Well, maybe not. At any rate, this something seemed like a particularly good and healthy something to be doing on a lazy blue-gray Sunday morning.

That said, Paul Benney and Clarinda MacLow of cmlperformance did clue us in to the TRYST events of the preceding days. In one, participants carried red umbrellas through the city streets, each bearing a single word of the phrase Daydreaming Subverts Reality - a sentiment worth its weight in silver-lined clouds.
We were a small group - seven - and though Glowlab’s Peter Lasell and I were the only ones who had’t previously met the other participants - a real case of psychogeography, family-style - we didn’t feel like outsiders, thanks to the welcoming, warm and fuzzy vibe exuded by the participants. Two props and two caveat laters, we were on our way. The props: a large, white, finger-pointing, wire mesh glove that lent a touch of Yellow Submarine surrealism to the proceedings, and a map of San Francisco (why do I keep meeting people from San Francisco?). Caveat one: the walk would be led by whoever chose to do so at any time - a tap on the shoulder, a handing-off of the aforementioned props, and the self-appointed leader could guide the group in whatever direction he or she wished, using the glove to draw the group’s attention to sights of particular interest. Caveat Two: the walk would be conducted in absolute silence.

Starting out at the trisection of Rutgers, Essex and East Broadway, we wandered through Chinatown, fruit stands and purple awnings drenched in the liquid glare of mid-morning sunshine. Iris (Clarinda’s mother) leading the way, we walked along the river (I swear it smelled like the ocean), the bridge as high as an elephant’s eye. Skip-hearted, I was ready to start belting out Harper's Bizarre’s seminal bridge song, “Feelin’ Groovy”. Fortunately for all present, I restrained myself.

Further south and back and down and up and back again, past housing projects, cutting through alleys, it really felt like we were doing something playful and, at times, zenlike in its mindful quietude. Peter, in a stroke of telepathic genius, led us into a dollar store, one of the hundreds, if not thousands, that line a single block. So, we each picked something out, why not? Pixie sticks, a floppy hat , vegetable-shaped fridge magnets (later to find their way onto the hoods of unsuspecting cars).

Among the many, many virtues of silence in a city that never shuts up, not least is the almost immediate sense of relaxation afforded when, with a group of relative strangers, one finds that it is not incumbent upon one to offer up one’s thoughts, to deftly weave in and out of ongoing commentary, or to pick up the slack of a conversation. Think about it. When was the last time you were with a group of people for almost two hours and spoke not a word? (Yoga classes don’t count).

In the city, walking alone, we may be preoccupied by our own thoughts or barely notice them. Sitting alone on the subway, silence is a defense, a choice not to interact beyond what is required. But walking silently with a small group - far from provoking the discomfort of a thudding lapse in conversation between two people - is a kind of freedom, the freedom to be there while not being there, the freedom to be in the moment without worrying about what’s coming next. In psychogeographic terms, a silent derive allows a greater personal interaction with the immediate environs, a comfortable and familiar space to get lost in, without the deflecting shield of conversation and its embedded hierarchical structures. Distractions still abounded, but wthout the vehicle of speech, we were forced to, with all attendant goofiness, write notes or wave arms to get someone’s attention.

Of course, there was the giant pointing finger, as well.

And a very cute dog.

Things observed:

a t-shirt declaring “Love is in the Air”...
more graffiti than you can shake a pixie stick at...
signs telling the fascinating history of Rutgers Slip...
an orblike monument...
the way a shadow forms a space, dips into the ground, and comes up with something new...
a purple flower.

I’d like to tell you we made it all the way to the end without uttering a word, and we did, almost...
Peter was pointing to a guy rolling down a center median a cart loaded to absurdity with slabs of meat. “Yeah? “ I mouthed. “What?” Was he talking about the meat guy? or was there something else? What was i missing? Peter gestured more frantically, pointing emphatically, but I just wasn’t getting it. I shrugged, an exaggerated gesture, palms to the sky.

Finally Peter just shrugged and said aloud, “I said: That’s a hell of a lot of meat.”

By Felix Q. Varga

Deborah Warner’s Angel Project – a heady mixture of theater, installation and performance running for a few weeks as part of the Lincoln Center Festival – offered participants, for a mere $90, the psychogeographic excursion of a lifetime: beginning at Roosevelt Island, you travel into the city with directions to various addresses around Times Square, interacting with a series of installations.

Yep, that's right. Times Square: a throbbing bad-trip migraine of noise-crowd-smog-neon and BUYBUYBUYBUYBUY...five minutes and already eyes glazing over...fifteen minutes and I’m convinced that the gateway to Hell is not, as originally suspected, located along a lonely stretch of highway somewhere in Ohio, but just beyond the Sony Jumbotron evil-clown-grinning down at yours truly.

And yet, the cheery push-shove of Times Square is exactly what made it a perfect substrate against (also behind, above, underneath, and inside of) which to find a lonesome angel or two.

But alas! Neither FQV nor the Man of the Crowd (my itinerant companion) could scrounge together (despite attacking sofa cushions with zeal) the required funds. Art with a capital A, it appears, is for the privileged (or at least gainfully employed) few. FQV has no qualms about admitting it: he’s an unrepentant leech. So when MOTC scored an Angel Project guidebook on the down low, we set off on our officially unsanctioned journey. Though FQV has a low tolerance for the pretensions of High Art, he loved Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’ lyrical and melancholy meditation on the angel as detached, trenchcoated observer; The Angel Project takes this idea and literally runs with it. Besides which, it just sounded fun.

Entering hidden spaces, wandering in and out of hushed chambers encountering surprise after surprise – a room of brilliantly colored live finches, a floor inches-deep in salt and the footprints of Those Who Have Gone Before, a row of lockers containing myriad objects (child’s ID bracelet, postcard, dance program), spaces on the verge of collapse, hovering between here and there: the angel as ghost, wandering a neutral and ephemerally lovely purgatory. Designed as a solitary excursion, rooms filled with the traces of invisible occupants – flowers, feathers, musty bedding on the floor, bins of assorted religious books illuminated by eerily glowing single light bulbs – couldn’t help but provoke a mix of wonder and the unease of being both watcher and watched. Watching and waiting. Us watching them watching us watching – you get the picture.

Ascending concrete stairwells, boarding rickety elevators (FQV’s claustrophobia kicked in more than once); a deserted apartment, abandoned, bombed-out office spaces, a breathtaking 27th floor loft, a decrepit theater located – amazingly – behind an Applebee’s emporium. A theater piece with few actors and no dialogue, each location provided instead clues to the overarching narrative, littered with objects juxtaposed to hint at hidden meanings – recurring themes of suicide and child abuse, habit as ritual, religion as cultural meme and the softness that lurks behind hard shiny surfaces.

Blissfully ignorant of The Rules (having by necessity missed the debriefing at the project’s start on Roosevelt Island – No Cameras, No Talking (to the actors, as presumably one was alone) – we snapped and chatted and marveled and wandered and scribbled and eventually received our comeuppance: at the last venue (the theater, with angels peering down from the balcony) a stern British woman (a plant, no less!) threatened to kick us out, all atremble with indignation. A harsh and disappointing ending. I'm not saying we didn’t deserve it, but still.

Afterwards FQV chewed all of his nails off while asking himself the question: were we being subversive or just plain rude? Were we guilty of disrespecting The Art – and should we have? I couldn’t shake off the feeling that we’d misbehaved. But shouldn’t art be for everyone? Of course there should be rules, but weren't rules meant to be broken?

The artists behind the Angel Project aimed to lead visitors on a guided meditation. A beautifully executed idea that left plenty of leeway for happy accidents – and I'm not even about to get into a tangent about documentation, art tourism, and whether we fell into a trap of our own making.

I keep wondering: did we miss the whole point? Or was the whole point to raise this very question?

Okay, so we stole fizzy lifting drinks. But there’s no getting around it – we should have had the ending Willy Wonka gave Charley and Grandpa – glass elevator, going upupup, and finally out and through!

We should have. Shouldn't we?

by Holly Tavel, Neuroscape Editor
Photographs by Matt Ames

Driving down traffic-clogged U.S. 192 in Kissimmee, Florida, hermetically sealed in your air-conditioned car, past t-shirt emporiums, cheap motels, discount stores, gas stations and scraggly palm trees, bludgeoned by an unending vista of frantic advertising (Sunglasses! T-Shirts! Designer Discounts! All Park Tickets Half-Price!), the phrase "so bad it's good" comes to mind. Except that U.S 192 is so bad it's...well, bad. True kitsch isn't funny or delightfully tacky or lovably strange. It's numbing. The reason U.S. 192 feels so desolate is because it has nothing to say, and there is nothing to say about it. Its facade is impenetrable, deflecting any attempt at narrative. The true goal of kitsch is, of course, the elimination of history, an aesthetic which finds its purest expression in Disney World's Magic Kingdom, a mere five miles up the road (when you start seeing the shiny purple signs, you've crossed over).

But wait...what is that thing? What thing? That. That...building. Is that a building? What the hell is that? Universally reviled by the locals, Xanadu: Home of the Future (the weird, ugly kid no onein the neighborhood wants to play with) sits just off the main highway in a moldering grayish heap, looking like a cluster of giant white toadstools or like the bleached husk of a washed-up sea monster. In fact, the metaphors keep coming. A spaceship crash-landed in a mucky swamp. The latest in igloo design for forward-thinking Eskimos. A set piece for a low-budget remake of Logan's Run.

D. Macdiarmid sends us this photo from Tainan, in southern Taiwan.



here's what else we found out about Taiwan's fourth largest city:

Walking around Tainan

Coffin Cakes

Map of Tainan

Temples of Tainan

"Round the world, around the everlasting, there is a moment, and an eternity, masquerade. i am here, though you may not know me, we are one and the same. our consciousness' intertwine by default."

- streets of Berlin and Poland from Patrick Todd.

the rain comes, eventually. im sitting here looking through this window as the news on my radio tells me about far away people. ive never seen them. the sky is dark. this storm has lasted a few days now. the wind woke me up last night. there are a few people out on the street, rushing around with umbrellas. the rain can't hurt them, but the way they run you'd think it was acid falling from the sky. they're in such a hurry. i like how rain feels. i dont mind walking around and getting soaked. there's the sound of tires splicing through little street rivers. its warm in here. the radio crackles: more news. we all await what will happen next. sometimes, looking out there through windows it seems like just another TV show, no more real than the rest of it. the raindrops collect in gutters and weave their way through the city, eventually finding the ocean. this is just one of those cold dark days. im sitting here looking through this window, thinking, and watching people pass by.

- from Ryan Anderson

Oceanside, California. from Ryan Anderson.

Chelsea. NYC. from Christina Ray

Queensboro Bridge. NYC. from Christina Ray

Williamsburg Bridge. Brooklyn. from Christina Ray

Aleksanterinkatu, Porvoo. from Niklas Tverin.

Drive past Antwerp once if you ever in the opportunity to do so. When stuck in the traffic digestion of it's inner city you wished you would have come by train, but seen as a panorama from your car while driving on one of the motorways alongside it, it is truly the most beautiful city in the world.
Like all Belgium cities, Antwerp is gritty, chaotic, a little shabby, desperately in demand of some tenderness; Belgium cities always appear to be of a deeper shade of grey, a grey so deeply rooted in the place that a nuclear explosion of all the colours in the world combined wouldn't be able to make it disappear.
The roads around Antwerp are laid out in such a way that the city zooms in & out for your pleasure only, giving you a glimpse of it from above; when it's hidden under the smoke, fading away into the horizon. Then the road leads into what seems to be the outskirts of other less remote outskirts. This manmade desert of Antwerp is filled with factories & offices without a clear purpose, perhaps not even used at all, redundant warehouses, enormous curved concrete silo's that resemble giant grenades from the second world-war, a forty screen cinema with a parking lot as big as a small planet, clusters of Soviet style high-rises that are off course grey, but grey without inspiration; the bland grey of suicidal buildings.
Brussels, being the headquarter of the European Union, has adapted itself to a new style, countless glass office towers define the skylines nowadays, making it less a city of grey; but Brussels has always been more of a yellowish city; a yellow tainted by grey, but still. Not so for Antwerp where even new buildings seem to have been there for centuries, acquiring a grey skin of their own, as if being polite, trying to fit in with the default colour coding of the urban ambiance.
At the end of the Antwerp manoeuvre there is usually a tunnel, a deep hole of mesmerizing grey walls lit up by flickering white lights. It takes ages to get to the end of it & once you resurface the city has disappeared behind yous. It only takes a little while to get the to French or Dutch border now.

- from Wilfried Hou je Bek

Frost Street, Brooklyn. from Christina Ray.

Vieux-Port, Montreal. from Christina Ray.

Amsterdam psychogeography. from Wilfried Hou Je Bek.

Dan Casey's back yard. Barrie, Ontario, Canada.

Amsterdam. from Liam Frankland.

N. 3rd St./Wythe Ave. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. from Christina Ray.

Oceanside, California. from Ryan Anderson.

Toronto. from Yuri Dojc.

winter sunday, temperatures below freezing. i was invited to a friends' light-filled loft for a champagne brunch. she lives in her workspace and her kitchen is limited to a hotplate and a toaster oven. remarkably, she set out a spread of scrambled tofu with kale, roasted new potatoes, and cheese grits for six. we consumed four bottles of champagne and a pot of coffee in 2 hours. when i made my way home, i realised i was out of toilet paper. i jumped in the little white car and cruised the handful of blocks to the commercial sector of williamsburg. parking in front of the metropolitan pool, one of my favorite songs came on the radio. my champagne buzz was percolating slowly into a champange headache. i turned off the engine and cranked the volume. i sang along to queen's 'bohemian rhapsody' at the top of my lungs in this parking space on bedford avenue.

- from Sharilyn Neidhardt

Oakland, California. from Brian Glibert.

Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. from Chad Ferber.

looking south(side), Williamsburg. from Christina Ray.

three sheets to the wind in Williamsburg. from Christina Ray.

night wanderings in Pittsfield, MA. from Shaun O'Boyle.

tv's image sends me codes to translate so this is what I see inside the screen, new spaces to live in and images to analyze... from Héctor Espinosa, México D.F.

sugar factory snow, Williamsburg. from Sharilyn.

photographs: Christina Ray